Everybody Was So Young by Amanda Vaill Little, Brown 470pp, £22.50
`They say, Lady Hunstanton, that when good Americans die they go to Paris." "Indeed? And when bad Americans die, where do they go to?" "Oh, they go to America."
This is from A Woman of No Importance, written in 1893, and as usual dear Oscar was ahead of his time. Thirty years later, the young Hemingway and his first wife Hadley were living just around the corner from the Boulevard Raspail, where James Joyce was working on Ulysses. Also in Paris were Picasso and Joan Miro, Stravinsky and Prokofiev, Archibald MacLeish, John Dos Passos, Ford Madox Ford, e.e. cummings, Aaron Copland, Cole Porter, and Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.
Paris was a place where, to quote Ezra Pound, one could "make it new". A generation of young Frenchmen had died in Flanders, and their place was eagerly claimed by those who had come to invent or re-invent themselves. The young Hemingway, that ultimate poseur, was entering the long, golden summer that stretched between his being discovered and being found out. Scott Fitzgerald, having invented the Jazz Age, had become its victim; and Paris was a kind of bolt-hole where he could live cheaply while writing The Great Gatsby. He was already a drunk, and Zelda was mentally unstable; their future was firmly behind them.
When Gerald and Sara Murphy arrived in Paris, it was in the nature of a re-birth. They were rich, or, more accurately, Sara was, whereas Gerald was merely well-to-do, the son of a Boston-born retailer of leather and fancy goods, who shrank from human contact, even with his children. Sara Wiborg's father was an industrialist, who took his daughters to Europe every year. The girls were presented to Kaiser Wilhelm II (who declined to offer his withered right hand) and the Kaiserin. Sara met Gerald Cleary Murphy, who was four years her junior, at East Hampton, a summer resort of the wealthy. They became friends and, over ten years, fell in love. They married and had three lovely children, Honoria, Baoth - an old Irish name, so Gerald claimed - and Patrick.
In America, the Murphys were adrift. Murphy Senior looked upon his son as a failure in-waiting. France, when the couple got there with their children, was a homecoming of the spirit. They had taste as well as money. They made friends, among them Picasso, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos and MacLeish. Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Donald Ogden Stewart and the playwright (The Philadelphia Story) Philip Barry, would come later.
Gerald and Sara were not upmarket groupies, nor did they attempt by a process of osmosis to absorb the colouration of genius. They were a "golden couple": affectionate, cultured, intelligent and generous. They were patient and forbearing with Scott Fitzgerald, who was a puerile and contentious drunk - although he would prove to be as true a friend as they had. They were hospitable; they eased their friends' hard times by paying their bills. And they were devoted parents.
In short, if they were not paragons, their faults were venial. Gerald, a tireless party-giver, was a dandy, and there was a bisexuality in his nature which he refused to confront . In one of her few charitable moments, Lillian Hellman was to say that "he was a very brilliant and complicated man. To make definite statements about him would be a sin." As for Sara Murphy, she wore her pearls to the beach. Of Scott Fitzgerald, she said: "He was a sort of a masher, you know, he'd try to kiss you in taxis and things like that. But what's a little kiss between friends?" The worst thing one could claim against the Murphys was that they may have invented the Riviera.
In 1922, Cole Porter invited them to Antibes, a quiet little out-of-the-way port to which people came for its mildness in winter. In summer, it was empty; nobody was so vulgar as to swim or sunbathe in that heat. Gerald discovered La Garoupe, a small beach on the Cap d'Antibes, which was covered with seaweed and driftwood. He and Sara cleared a corner for themselves, then, almost single-handedly, he set about reclaiming the entire beach. He prevailed upon the Hotel du Cap to break with its policy of closing from May to September.
Thanks - if that is the word - to the Murphys, Antibes became a summer resort. Crowds came, invading La Garoupe. Sara wrote to Zelda Fitzgerald: ". . . by means of teaching the children to throw wet sand a good deal & by bringing several disagreeable dogs and staking them around - we managed to keep space open for sunbaths." In the end, the Murphys had no choice but to buy and refurbish a house of their own, which was their Camelot. Instead, they called it Villa America, which it became in every sense. (It is noteworthy that in the admirable index - a model of its kind - of Amanda Vaill's memoir, there is not one mention of Somerset Maugham, who held court at the Villa Mauresque on the Cap itself. Perhaps Americans were not to the Old Party's liking.)
Writers are by nature cannibalistic. For the characters of Dick and Nicole Diver in Tender Is the Night, Scott Fitzgerald used a palette that combined bits of Zelda and himself with facets of the Murphys. Sara was angry and rejected the idea of any similarity. Gerald thought otherwise; he wrote to Fitzgerald: "Only the invented part of our life - the unreal part - has had any scheme, any beauty."
Fitzgerald was at least well meaning and remained a friend. Hemingway, on the other hand, was a malevolent old woman disguised as a white hunter, and he was nakedly jealous of Scott Fitzgerald - Hemingway could never write a Gatsby. There are elements of Gerald Murphy in The Sun Also Rises; and in the posthumous A Movable Feast the attack on his one-time hosts and friends is as shameful as it is unprovoked.
Gerald Murphy was not a drone. Inspired by Picasso, he became a talented artist, whom Fernand Leger called the only American painter in Paris; and yet, perhaps because of his wealth, he remained a dilettante. And it was in the nature of things that a Camelot could not last. The Murphys' youngest boy, Patrick, went down with tuberculosis, and the family moved with him to a Swiss mountain hotel-cum-sanitorium. Dorothy Parker, who was usually selfishness incarnate, moved with them to what she called their "goddam Alp".
Patrick made a slow recovery, then the Murphys' other boy, Baoth, caught measles, which turned into double mastoiditis. When he died, Gerald and Sara were shattered. And, as if the fates were determined to exact full payment for the good years, Patrick suffered a relapse around the time of his sixteenth birthday and was dead within three months. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to them: "The golden bowl is broken indeed, but it was golden; nothing can ever take those boys away from you now." It was a remark as dumb as it was good-natured: the boys had been taken away.
If I have a grumble with Every- body Was So Young it is that, having done more than justice to what Gertrude Stein is said to have called the Lost Generation, it might have ended here, with the rest as tailpiece, if not silence. But the Murphys lived on into old age, through the Wall Street crash, the 1930s and the second World War. Archibald MacLeish won a Pulitzer Prize for J.B., a Broadway play which updated the Book of Job, and again the unfortunate Murphys served as templates. They survived nearly all their friends. Scott Fitzgerald died, penniless, of a heart attack; Zelda perished when her asylum caught fire; Hemingway blew his head off; Dorothy Parker ended up alone in a drab hotel room; Robert Benchley died of drink; and Philip Barry had a heart attack. It is a terribly sad book. For comfort, one cherishes the story of how Gerald Murphy told his children about pirates' buried treasure. He found a map hidden away in the garden of the Villa America, then he and Sara took Honoria, Baoth and Patrick by yacht from Antibes to St Tropez, swimming by day and telling ghost stories at bedtime. At last they found and dug up what seemed to be a very old chest. It was filled to its dazzling brim with coins and costume jewellery that Sara had bought in flea markets.
Perhaps, after all, Scott Fitzgerald was right and some things cannot be taken away.